“To my mind, the best scholar is always the autodidact – within or outside the academy – as only he or she has the motivation to really understand anything. If you’re a lecturer it’s a question of accessing the will to learn in your students and ensuring that this interest in ideas doesn’t get crushed under the weight of the student’s own insecurity, which is often massive” – Nina Powers.

Powers statement is something i’ve always wanted to believe, and maybe at one time did or was allowed to.  but autodidacticism is a myth propounded by academia itself on par with the naturalness of the German Genius of Goethean fame.  like the myth of people who “study all summer,” its a myth that there are people out there with time enough to troll books and mine the internet prior to any use for their epistemological adventures.  they don’t care that there’s no use for their adventures on wikipedia.  For academia, there is always some hidden resource or reserve that funds the activity of autodidacts: their own cleverness, preying on friends, misappropriated funds, parents, loans, and so on.  Autodidacts are not inherently “scholarly.”  Perhaps any autodidacts left roaming the world have already left the blasted heath of academia.  They are gestating something fetid and horrifying somewhere in the cubefarms of the West and East.  Fly, fly the salt flats of this dead sea.

http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/site/index/interview_with_taz/

"Hawk" - Kuniyoshi Utawgawa

“Whenever I wish to prove something, I do so for others.  When I prove, teach, or write, then I do so, I hope, not for myself; for I also know, at least in essentials, what I do not write, teach, and discuss.  This is also the reason why one often finds it most difficult to write about something which one knows best, which is so perfectly certain and clear to oneself that one cannot understand why other should not know it as well.  A writer who is so certain of the object he is to write about that he would not even take the trouble to write about it falls into a category of humor that is in a class by itself.  He defeats the purpose of writing through writing, and jokes about proofs in his proofs.  If I am to write and, indeed, write well and in a fundamental way, then I must doubt that the others know what I know, or at least that they know it in the same way as I do.Only because of that can I communicate any thoughts.  But I also presuppose that they should and can know them.  To teach is not to drum things into a person; rather, the teacher applies himself to an active capacity, to a capacity to learn” – Ludwig Feuerbach

From “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy.”   The Young Hegelians: An Anthology.  Cambridge UP, 1983.  p103.

well, another year is about to begin at gradschool.  The final year of the masters program: what will it hold?  I anticipate that this 2nd year will be the proof of what was only blindly stumbled upon in in the terrifying darkness of the 1st year.  The later as the truth of the former: perhaps this retrospective maxim (and maxim of retrospection) will bear me forward in confidence this year.  If i think too long on the future, my ability to think at all disappears.  All prediction is self-defeating: the future appears today as the end of thought, that gleam of the sabre that issues forth in the war-cry of action that is anything but decisive.

806.  Every stage of life corresponds to a certain philosophy.  A child appears as a realist; for it is as certain of the existence of pears and apples as it is of its own being.  A young man, caught up in the storm of his inner passions, has to pay attention to himself, look and feel ahead; he is transformed into an idealist.  A grown man, on the other hand, has every reason to be a sceptic; he is well advised to doubt whether the means he has chosen to achieve his purpose can really be right.  Before action and in the course of action he has every reason to keep his mind flexible so that he will not have to grieve later on about a wrong choice.  An old man, however, will always avow mysticism.  He sees that so much seems to depend on chance: unreason succeeds, reason fails, fortune and misfortune unexpectedly come to the same thing in the end; this is how things are, how they were, and old age comes to rest in him who is, who has and ever will be.  (Goethe Maxims and Reflections 108).

And to this, I would like to add the drunk.  A drunk is a Deleuzian whose careening movement threatens to be the end of itself and those around it; it can be a dance which defies the rigid paths of man-made streets, the paths carved between chairs and tables; in this, his movement – his life – is more like that of an animal spurning the paths and works of man.  The drunk encounters works not like the appreciative critic, but the eviction man: the space on which art takes place has been condemned, making it a welcome home for squatters and the return of nature.  Like Nietzsche’s madman, he runs into the street only to herald the end of a thinking of the streets, a street-think: to kick our minds out of the gutter-church.  Of course, this is an aristocratic drunk, a dilettante of the street; his comedy has not yet traversed to the other mask of drunkness.  No, he is not yet the tragic drunk for whom all hope as departed, whose horizontal nature means he has become the street.

Alright, off to read Clausewitz for tomorrow’s seminar…  I relish a few quotes from Goethe and Nietzsche before working…

cfcf – Raining Patterns.  Cf. Hood Internet’s Icecube mashup.

Booka Shade – Sweet lies

I came across this video on facebook.  A friend who is probably depressed had it posted on his wall.  We see: class escapism and insubordination.  And believe me, this video is escapist par excellance.  The lies that kept the veneer of family coherent.  We have an insatiable, uncontrollable desire to see things turn into the opposite, to hear “i’m leaving you” and “i love you” in the same breath.  The city becomes the symbolic screen to locate the elusive Real of that first trauma.  As such, the city is woman: essentially empty and full of holes.

The video begins of long tracking shots (presumably from a vehicle) of a metropolitan night life which will act as the stage for the rest of the piece.  Like Lost In Translation, the voyeur shot oozes isolation, emptiness, and desolation along with the hollow orphic tones interspersed with inhuman wails of pre-packaged traffic founds.  The city appears to be a ghost town to the alien viewer who cannot recognize any(thing)one.  Suburbia has landed on the moon: ‘I will repopulate it with my memories, fears, and anxiety about the other’.  Its always night and slums of downtown areas are the playpens of the nascent ruling class.  Like vampires, the city disappears in the day.

We get a self-reflection (which is not one) of the camera-car-of-the-law: our ghostly spot-light eye is the ephemeral and mobile center that will organize the city spectacle around us and for us.  It caresses the surface of the under-structure, teasing out its social crevices and contradictions which are ours and us to behold.  A scratchy radio voice announces the awakening night as the beautiful day.  As if to say: “Dance, City! Show me what I want to see, show me my fantasy”

Scene: A cop getting a blowjob in an alley.  The corrupt edifice of social order.  “That’s pretty sweet, but not sweet enough”.

Scene: exclusion and prohibition.  The night club bouncer embodying the regulatory function of social law along class lines which are invisible to us.  Our spot-light eye tickles the scaffolds of the superstructures.  Give me more, it says.

A scene of rejection.  A man advances a proposition to his female companion: stay with me.  We are to sympathize with his dirty face and loneliness.  She says no.  And so the spot-light cannot linger any longer.  It speeds up.  Get out of here,  This is too Real, to painful, to close to home.  Sing!  Sing this street empty of all its vermin like a hipster pied-piper.  You say its not so easy.  You say this life will tear us apart.  Freaks, show me freaks now!  Pretend its a start.  You got to learn to let go

Scene: Our mother is now a prostitute walking resolute.  It morphs into a transsexual prostitute and un-wigs itself, disrobes, strips for us in the street with the cold dead eyes of financial commerce.  Don’t anything, we know your story already, says the spotlight: our spot-light moves on.

Scene: the scaffolds of the superstructure are rejecting the human occupants.  Our mother says she’ll jump, throw herself from these constructions, leave this family, spill revolution into the street.  The invisible man that is us commands “thou shalt not jump”.  Do not leave me mother. Its going to be different.  The transiency of life disavows your class responsibility.  Rock me to sleep in my city-womb.

Scene: Our invisible man spotlight fucks a woman in a stairwell.  Of course she loves it, she can’t refuse, she owes us her life.  A drunk clown is passed out: our bourgeois and golden childhood has dragged itself into the gutter where nostalgia can momentarily rescue it.  Drink, father.  We have fallen there with it.  Let me die here, rather than live here and change things, it says.  I have lost my class roots, my palaces, my horses, my family christmases.  And we let our nostalgia linger, incinerate the invisible people of the city.  The city is a grave.

Scene: our business man father is ruing his automobile, his home, his performance of stability.  self-destruction is socially acceptable as long as its not social.

Our camera car chases down the fugitive protagonist that is not us as such but the fantasy.  Our gaze is the law, the rule, the ruling idea.

They [the geniuses] all had that thorough earnestness for work which learns first to how to form the different parts perfectly before it ventures to make a great whole; they gave themselves time for this, because they took more pleasure in doing small, accessory things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.  For instance, the recipe of becoming a good novelist is easily given, but the carrying out of the recipe presupposes qualities which we are in the habit of overlooking when we say, ‘I have not sufficient talent’.  Make a hundred or more sketches of novel-plots, none more than two pages long, but of such clearness that every word in them is necessary; write down anecdotes every day until you learn to find the most pregnant, most effective form; never weary of collecting and delineating human types and characters; above all, narrate things as often as possible and listen to narrations with a sharp eye and ear for the effect upon people present; travel like a landscape painter and a designer of costumes; take from different sciences everything that is artistically effective, if it be well represented; finally, meditate on the motives for human action, scorn not even the smallest point of instruction on this subject, and collect similar matters by day and night.  Spend some ten years in these various exercises: then the creations of your study may be allowed to see the light of day.  But what do most people do, on the contrary?  They do not begin with the part, but with the whole.  Perhaps they make one good stroke, excite attention, and ever afterwords their work grows worse and worse, for good, natural reasons.  But sometimes, when intellect and character are lacking for the formation of such an artistic career, fate and necessity take the place of these qualities and lead the future master step by step through all the phases of his craft” (HAH I, s163).

"This could be you!"

Nautical Museum: the naval history of the world as the dominance of and unity between the colonial(European) and christian narrative in the arena of the New World.  Popeye as pedagogue of older generation telling one narrative, while youth inscribe its actuality, movement: the change of frames from Old World to New, where Sinbad is evacuated backwards to the Old, and Popeye to the history of the New.  In the cartoon, the retelling happens historically in reverse:

1) The crossing of the Delaware (which popeye’s nephews bring to life when they ‘stand in the boat of history’ and become its driving force in the present.  Finishing each other’s sentences, the fragmented and unfinished youth are the sequential force which keep history alive, and realize themselves as individual Americans.

2) Noah’s ark (“The world’s first sailor”) where the nephews act out Popeye’s narration of the flood.  they (american youth) “make actual” the petrified monuments of biblical narratives, nurturing it as one waters a plants growth.  Museum’s are often described as places where “history comes to life”.

3) The towering statue of “the mighty mariner Sinbad, the greatest sailor who ever lived”.  The West’s monument to their Arab adversary becomes a didactic moment for Popeye to reassert the nautical prowess on the screen of an imaginary Orient.  It is only at the foot of the Arab world/history can the West project their dominance, only at the shores of the Other do Columbus’s ship’s emerge as a historical force from the meaninglessness of the sea.

There is a strange trinity of Washington, Noah, and Sinbad.  First, the hero of American independence and autonomy of the new world.  Second, the hero of spiritual survival and the test of faith (America was often compared to a utopic ark saving the immigrants).  Lastly, Sinbad as the pure abstraction or organizing myth.  The course of the animation sees Sinbad’s transformation/erasure from concrete villain into rubble, from “name” of absence into absence itself.

At least, victory must appear decisive

Popeye begins his retelling with “knocking the tar out of Sinbad,” mixing two narratives the West tells about the Orient, and the economic forces which drive sea-exploration and expansion then (as today): Oil.  Physical and economic confrontation/conflation.  On the imaginary “Isle of Sinbad,” an exotic and dangerous condensation of the colonial evils of India, Africa, and the Orient, the animal masses form the incomprehensible locals ringing and giving epic nature to the combat between Sinbad (Bluto elsewhere, a true ‘floating signifier’ of disavowed otherness) and Popeye.  The fight is as naturalized: it is “fair” as a survival of the fittest on equal footing of the natural world “fists only”.  However, after popeye’s initial defeat in the ring of physical combat, the can of spinach becomes a substitute for the oil drum, America’s object of desire and economic weapon against the Oriental foe which destabilizes the entire imaginary island/ground.  Popeye consumes the spinach, and the electric generators are projected onto his hyperbolic biceps (body as text).  Popeye smuggles this contraband into the symbolic economy of fantasy island: he literally has the commodity form “up his sleeve” as a wild card against his own fantasy of balanced combat which (initally, and always) defeats him.  A victor must appear even in land of the equal.    The West desires to be defeated in an Oriental fashion.  The consumption of the spinach adds the torsion which reverses the earlier outcome, from desired defeat to triumph as inevitable.  The can of spinach “accelerates” the means of production (popeye) into a form that trumps its historical and residual forms, the same way Popeye’s nephews “actualize” the dormant remains of history, destroying and re-inscribing in their wake.  (this is why even Popeye checks his nephews “acting out history”: they trespass against the monuments reality when they “perform” them, or raise them to the level of unreal fantasy).  These reversals (of monument to fantasy) drive the logic of the story of occidental-oriental relations.  This is perhaps the reading we need to stress against the vulgar/cultural one of the spinach can-as-drum of oil which persists at the level of the musem: it is merely symbolic, without any reversal, transitions, or dynamic movement.   The natural world (fantasy) and commodity form (capitalism) however, are not opposites, but appear as such.  For capitalism, the existence of raw material is its central organizing fantasy found in Sinbad’s Island.  The exotic island is the other side of the commodity form, the ghost which haunts the structure of the nautical museum.

And what is animation but the acceleration of pictures, the sensation of change between frames raised to its highest power?  Desire is traversed.

This is not a battle of two men, but a story of how contest must appear: that of Western economies to “represent,” (the obligation to retell history the story commodities and how they “speak” for us), and the speechless other that is Sinbad, a force of nature that must be “tamed” and “civilized” into a consumable form.  Sinbad/Bluto’s defeat is more than a symbolic struggle of east and west, but a struggle over the very terms upon and stakes in the contest.  Meaning animates speechless history;or, animation means a certain history of the other becomes speechless in the gap between frames.

Sinbad in the pit of the Dead - Gustav Dore (1874)

...Insofar as Your Mind Is Not Yours.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of defense journals, Guardian/NY Times (At War, War Log)/various blogs alongside the usual diet of theory/philosophy/german poetry.  This might be in subconscious preparation for a graduate course on the intersection of critical theory and terrorism/War proper.  Clausewitz predominates a lot of the theory discussion, but it often becomes one of ethics in the civil-military/private-public relation.  The military currently is the ‘primary’ public discourse, which makes civil politics its domestic, private, other.  Wikileaks is undermining this conservative axiom of power.

Here is Eric Schmitt’s (NYT) summary of the Steven Aftergood’s nuanced utilitarian response to Wikileaks:

Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, in his blog posting on June 28 accused WikiLeaks of “information vandalism” with no regard for privacy or social usefulness. “WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals,” he wrote.

Wikileaks is a hub for dissent outside the normal outlets provided in social, workplace, and cultural avenues.  It creates a central virtual “gap” in the contours of smooth functioning top-down, hierarchical, authority.  Bradley E. Manning’s practice of motivated “cyberslacking” (something all institutional drones know well) provides insight into the dangers of spare time spliced into the fabric of the work day. Was he given so little work that he “thought too much”?  His contact, a hacker, is a possible agent provoacteur.

Wikileaks radical “openness” betrays the closed, hushed, socially unacceptable nature of “speaking out of place” in Aftergood’s “Open Society”.  In such a society, Law openly acknowledges its methods of hypocritical containment, one which is the main target of Rousseau’s critiques: only through rule of law are you free.  When griping to your coworkers (the systems efficient, social, silent absorbsion of dissent), whining to your family, your bosses, you are ‘freely dissenting’ insofar as you are negating within a system of set controls promoting and maintaining existing authority.  What Wikileads gestures towards is the negation of negation, the circumventing of law: whining in a new language without clear “social utility,” or the controlled leaking of “pre-vandalized” information to the press through PR/marketing departments who purvey the interests and usefulness of its image.

The most interesting part is the crimes against individual rights which Aftergood cites.  It is only through a crime, through a mark/stain, that the principium individuationis functions.  Wikileaks produces no individual-authors as such, the same way terrorism does not produce the traditional solider identity under the Rules of Engagement.  In making them criminals, the identity limbo is resolved.  Griping and dissent are in the West a regulated ritual of becoming an individual, of attaining a (false) self-consciousness about the contradictions of society through internalizing this conflict within a notion of personal freedom.  It’s how we say (without saying): “Daddy’s monopoly on power and affirmation is not justified”.  Griping is a form of rhetoric; it is how we speak about discontent, how we think about conflicts and crisis.  How we sublimate trauma.  Thinking here is synonymous with “resolution”.  But who does this resolution benefit?  In terms of the data/cables leaked, the institutions no longer control the rhetoric, the perspective, on such visceral events.  A PR disaster.  What is analyzable material confronts us; the tools of analysis lay in wait.  We have been tampered with like false coins, not tempered like steel.

No guts to stay in your (maybe small) hometown where you could watch yourself become alone, conservative, jaded, and cynical.  You never learned to become hemlock dangerous in highschool.  You can’t even see a way out without a way-out place.  Instead, you will move with the whiffs of Rome, (un)discover to the negative container city of dreams where you’ll learn to forget, become blind to, the process of getting old – of becoming conservative, jaded, and cynical.  Run – because you know your class mobility ran out – to montreal.  Nothing is more mobile that the flying husks of seeds.

To the solitary, young middle-class intellectuals who reside, persist, duree, in basement rooms beside their highschools:

This is your arctic assertion in ice.  The Inuit high-kick is a mental exercise (in) your exile.  hold your atrophying mind in your smoke-blistered resolute gaze.  let your hometown laid flat wash bitter over you.  taste it.  your imperative is read.  your declaration is “a ruthless critique of all that exists”.  you are acid-oscillate.  you are parallax.  you are without decadence and kindred spirits.  Think through your fear that “this is it“.  It is only winter but this is not a dream: it is dangerous to stay.